Website Technology Issues Forum

I am trying to get some input of you as to what applications you use to develop websites and web applictions. This is to get some feedback for a book I am writing, and with your permissions I will publish your motivation(s) for using the particular application(s).

It works for me fine. It can work alongside access/excel etc without a prob. I do admit I have to edit the HTML a bit, and cut some of the excess out of it, but i will continue to use FP for ease of use

I also use photoshop, and thats about it really. I sometimes use some freeware sparingly, and dabble using other programs, but for now, those programs do the business for me (a science site and local business sites).

I imagine the more experienced users have a vast array of software at their fingertips ;)

Dreamweaver 4 - IMO the best WYSISYG editor out there with the cleanest code.

Fireworks 4 - Integrates well with DW for use of rollovers ,preloading images and optimisation of images. I suppose Image Ready will do the same thing, but I learnt on Fireworks so I'll stay with it for now. It does however create quite bloated code.

Photoshop 6 - I think I only use 5% of Photoshops functions and it more than looks after my needs. I only wish I had the time to learn more to do with it.

AdobeAcrobat 5 - PDF's, what can I say?

CFStudio 4.5.2 - Have started using CFStudio to write CF Dynamic pages and web applications. Integrates well with both HomeSite and DW4 (and so it should coming from the same company). Colour codes the code making it easy to see mistakes (which there are a lot of at the moment).

And the actual server side is Apache 1.3.22, ColdFusion 5, and SQL SERVER 2000.

GoLive for page design (generates clean, standards-compliant code) Photoshop for almost all my graphics, web or print BBEdit for hand editing code (Mac-only, AFAIK) Acrobat for the mountains of PDF product documentation we have

I've just started playing with FileMaker for manipulating flat-file databases on the desktop... up 'till now, I just used BBEdit for that as well.

All the servers I've hosted on have been Linux/Apache boxes with Perl and the other standard goodies.

Arachnophilia html text editor is v e r y clean. Paint shop pro 7 and occasionally photoshop 6 Flash 5 for banners to put on others sites (lol) wsftp Last but not least sites like this excellent one to bone up on techniques and tips.

The Gimp makes a fine companion. Next to that theres's xfig for diagrams, and I can't believe I actually started using Flash5 as an application front-end on top of XMLRPC.

One thing I'm thinking about is to write a little converter, that would take files from StarOffice 6, and turn the XML data into HTML markup. It should be relatively straightforward to set up a configurable translation from text styles to <h#> and whatever else you need. Have it fill the result into an HTML document template, and you can let any non-techie write your content in a normal word processor. Unfortunately, that converter doesn't exist yet, so I'm still writing my HTML manually.

Dreamweaver is very nice for playing with layouts. For text editing on my PC, I use editpad (www.jgsoft.com I think) and have renamed the file notepad.exe so that all those programs which automatically launch notepad(ex: ws_ftp), now launch editpad instead. vi if I'm editing on the server, its pretty quick once you get used to it. Used to use WS_FTP extensively, played with a couple other ftp'ers that had benefits, but am currently migrating to using WinSCP. Its a poorer user interface, but its the only encrypted ftp client I know of and I'm a security freak. Still use my old Paint Shop Pro 6 occasionally, but have mostly migrated to photoshop 6. Tried PHP IDE (www.phpide.com) for awhile, but the color coding (especially w/ complex strings) was messed up so much it was hardly usable. If anyone knows any other good PHP ide's around, let me know. I might just see what Visual Studio does with such files. Visual Studio for C++ scripting. Putty for telnet (security again). Opera for browsing. Winamp with the milkdrop visualization plugin (www.geisswerks.com) for relaxing - I just bought a new video card primarily for this app. Hmm, thats the unique stuff at least.

I use Arachnophilia for mark up and some site management...every so often I'll work in notepad just to keep in shape, it's the thing you can be sure almost all clients will have if you need to change anything whilst on their premises

WS-FTP for FTP, there is no competition, and I've tried a few

PSP7 for images, though I tend to subcontract graphics

Xenu for link checking

Opera for browsing...though again I also use Netscape 4 and IE now and again

Note Tab Pro (with our custom clipbooks), LeechFTP, Paint Shop Pro 6 (could never afford Photoshop and it seems to be over kill for Web work when we played with it several times over 4 years), Xenu, Putty, 3 main browsers.

Netobjects Fusion (No I'm not joking. It is a great piece of software) Dreamweaver Ultradev CodeCharge (gotta be seen to be believed) Photoshop Photoimpact Swish ShopFactory (Makes shopping carts. Lots of features and easy to use)

To my mind it doesn't matter much, I prefer to let Perl, ImageMagick, XSSI, Interchange and mod_rewrite do the hard work (and I use VIm on Linux and Notepad on Windows to play with those). I would use Paint Shop Pro for graphics if I had to do preparation.

Request: I'm looking for a decent keyboard friendly Windows FTP client. I tend to use CuteFTP 2.0 when I'm on 'doze and haven't found another client that's keyboard friendly enough. Unfortunately I have date problems with Cute 2 and my staff won't respond well if I roll out a command line app' to all desks. Cost isn't an issue - suggestions anyone? Maybe I should just set all the domains up with rsync.

I forgot one...pencil and paper (or Word outline numbering, or Visio or PostIt notes and a big desk). Just being able to see a map of the whole thing before you start, and as you continue is priceless.

Homesite - Coding, HTML vi for touchups on code. Photoshop - Graphics WebObjects - ecommerce development/production. Soon (hopefully) to be moved over to Oracle. Adobe Acrobat - we do a lotta (well, it seems to me....) PDFs.

SSH for shell access and file transfers. All servers are Apache and either Linux or Solaris, except our intranet website which still runs IIS on Win2K.